Conventional network systems provide functionality for determining responsiveness of network services to client requests. In some systems, an appliance providing access to a service may monitor the service for responsiveness and availability. An appliance may use a monitoring agent, such as a script or daemon to determine whether a service is available. However, a single monitoring agent may not accurately reflect the overall status of a given service. A single monitor may not test every aspect of a given service, or may not test the availability of a service from multiple locations.
However, systems using more than one monitor to monitor a given service may have difficulty handling conflicting reports from multiple monitoring agents. It would therefore be desirable to devise means for an appliance to determine whether a service is available based on availability reports from more than one monitoring agent.